WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN!
Mrs. Gilbert spoke very little during the homeward drive through the
moonlight. In her visions of that drive--or what that drive might
be--she had fancied Roland Lansdell riding by the carriage-window, and
going a few miles out of his way in order to escort his friends back to
Graybridge.
"If he cared to be with us, he would have come," Isabel thought, with a
pensive reproachful feeling about Mr. Lansdell.
It is just possible that Roland might have ridden after the fly from
Graybridge, and ridden beside it along the quiet country roads, talking
as he only in all the world could talk, according to Mrs. Gilbert's
opinion. It is possible that, being so sorely at a loss as to what he
should do with himself, Mr. Lansdell might have wasted an hour thus, had
he not been detained by his old friend Charles Raymond.
As it was, he rode straight home to Mordred Priory, very slowly,
thinking deeply as he went along; thinking bitter thoughts about himself
and his destiny.
"If my cousin Gwendoline had been true to me, I should have been an
utterly different man," he thought; "I should have been a middle-aged
steady-going fellow by this time, with a boy at Eton, and a pretty
fair-haired daughter to ride her pony by my side. I think I might have
been good for something if I had married long ago, when my mother died,
and my heart was ready to shelter the woman she had chosen for me.
Children! A man who has children has some reason to be good, and to do
his duty. But to stand quite alone in a world that one has grown tired
of; with every pleasure exhausted, and every faith worn threadbare; with
a dreary waste of memory behind, a barren desert of empty years
before;--to be quite alone in the world, the last of a race that once
was brave and generous; the feeble, worn-out remnant of a lineage that
once did great deeds, and made a name for itself in this world;--that
indeed is bitter!"
Mr. Lansdell's thoughts dwelt upon his loneliness to-night, as they had
never dwelt before, since the day when his mother's death and cousin's
inconstancy first left him lonely.
"Yes, I shall go abroad again," he thought presently, "and go over the
whole dreary beat once more--like Marryat's phantom captain turned
landsman, like the Wandering Jew in a Poole-built travelling dress. I
shall eat fish at Philippe's again, and buy more bouquets in the Rue
Castiglione, and lose more money at Hombourg, and shoot more crocodiles
on the banks of the Nile, and be laid up with another fever in the Holy
Land. It will be all the same over again, except that it will be a great
deal more tiresome this time."
And then Mr. Lansdell began to think what his life might have been, if
the woman he loved, or rather the woman for whom he had a foolish
sentimental fancy,--he did not admit to himself that his predilection
for Isabel Gilbert was more than this,--had been free to become his
wife. He imagined himself returning from those tiresome Continental
wanderings a twelve-month earlier than he had actually returned. "Ah,
me!" he thought, "only one little year earlier, and all things would
have been different!" He would have gone to Conventford to see his dear
old friend Charles Raymond, and there, in the sunny drawing-room, he
would have found a pale-faced, dark-eyed girl bending over a child's
lesson-book, or listening while a child strummed on the piano. He could
fancy that scene,--he could see it all, like a beautiful cabinet
picture; ah, how different, how different everything would have been
then! It would have been no sin then to be inexplicably happy in that
girlish presence; there would have been no vague remorseful pang, no
sting of self-reproach, mingling with every pleasant emotion, contending
with every thrill of mystic joy. And then--and then, some night in the
twilit garden, when the stars were hovering dim about the city roofs
still and hushed in the distance, he would have told her that he loved
her; that, after a decade of indifference to all the brightest things of
earth, he had found a pure unutterable happiness in the hope and belief
that she would be his wife. He fancied her shy blushes, her drooping
eyes suddenly tearful in the depth of her joy; and he fancied what his
life might have been for ever afterwards, transformed and sublimated by
its new purpose, its new delights; transfigured by a pure and exalted
affection. He fancied all this as it all might have been; and turned and
bowed his face before an image that bore his own likeness, and yet was
not himself--the image of a good man, happy husband and father, true
friend and gentle master, dwelling for ever and ever amidst that
peaceful English landscape; beloved, respected, the centre of a happy
circle, the key-stone of a fair domestic arch,--a necessary link in the
grand chain of human love and life.
"And, instead of all this, I am a wandering nomad, who never has been,
and never can be, of any use in this world; who fills no place in life,
and will leave no blank when he dies. When Louis the Well-beloved was
disinclined for the chase, the royal huntsmen were wont to announce that
to-day his majesty would do nothing. I have been doing nothing all my
life, and cannot even rejoice in a stag-hunt."
Mr. Lansdell beguiled his homeward way with many bitter reflections of
this kind. But, inconsistent and vacillating in his thoughts, as he had
been ever inconsistent and vacillating in his actions, he thought of
himself at one time as being deeply and devotedly in love with Isabel
Gilbert, and at another time as being only the victim of a foolish
romantic fancy, which would perish by a death as speedy as its birth.
"What an idiot I am for my pains!" he said to himself, presently. "In
six weeks' time this poor child's pale face will have no more place in
my mind than the snows of last winter have on this earth, or only in
far-away nooks and corners of memory, like the Alpine peaks, where the
snows linger undisturbed by the hand of change. Poor little girl! how
she blushes and falters sometimes when she speaks to me, and how pretty
she looks then! If they could get such an Ingénue at the Français, all
Paris would be mad about her. We are very much in love with each other,
I dare say; but I don't think it's a passion to outlast six weeks'
absence on either side, not on her side certainly, dear romantic child!
I have only been the hero of a story-book; and all this folly has been
nothing more than a page out of a novel set in action. Raymond is very
right. I must go away; and she will go back to her three-volume novels,
and fall in love with a fair-haired hero, and forget me."
He sighed as he thought this. It was infinitely better that he should be
forgotten, and speedily; and yet it is hard to have no place in the
universe--not even one hidden shrine in a foolish woman's heart. Mr.
Lansdell was before the Priory gates by this time. The old woman stifled
a yawn as she admitted the master of the domain. He went in past the
little blinking light in the narrow Gothic window, and along the winding
roadway between cool shrubberies that shed an aromatic perfume on the
still night air. Scared fawns flitted ghost-like away into deep recesses
amid the Mordred oaks; and in the distance the waterdrops of a cascade,
changed by the moonbeams into showers of silver, fell with a little
tinkling sound amongst great blocks of moss-grown granite and wet fern.
Mordred Priory, seen in the moonlight, was not a place upon which a man
would willingly turn his back. Long ago Roland Lansdell had grown tired
of its familiar beauties; but to-night the scene seemed transformed. He
looked at it with a new interest; he thought of it with a sad tender
regret, that stung him like a physical pain.
As he had thought of what his life might have been under other
circumstances, he thought now of what the place might have been. He
fancied the grand old rooms resonant with the echoes of children's
voices; he pictured one slender white-robed figure on the moonlit
terrace; he fancied a tender earnest face turned steadily towards the
path along which he rode; he felt the thrilling contact of a caressing
arm twining itself shyly in his; he heard the low murmur of a loving
voice--his wife's voice!--bidding him welcome home.
But it was never to be! The watch-dog's honest bark--or rather the bark
of several watch-dogs--made the night clamorous presently, when Mr.
Lansdell drew rein before the porch; but there was no eye to mark his
coming, and be brighter when he came; unless, indeed, it was the eye of
his valet, which had waxed dim over the columns of the "Morning Post,"
and may have glimmered faintly, in evidence of that functionary's
satisfaction at the prospect of being speedily released from duty.
If it was so, the valet was doomed to disappointment; for Mr.
Lansdell--usually the least troublesome of masters--wanted a great deal
done for him to-night.
"You may set to work at once with my portmanteau, Jadis," he said, when
he met his servant in the hall. "I must leave Mordred to-morrow morning
in time for the seven o'clock express from Warncliffe. I want you to
pack my things, and arrange for Wilson to be ready to drive me over. I
must leave here at six. Perhaps, by the bye, you may as well pack one
portmanteau for me to take with me, and you can follow with the rest of
the luggage on Monday."
"You are going abroad, sir?"
"Yes, I am tired of Mordred. I shall not stop for the hunting season.
You can go up-stairs now and pack the portmanteau. Don't forget to make
all arrangements about the carriage; for six precisely. You can go to
bed when you've finished packing. I've some letters to write, and shall
be late."
The man bowed and departed, to grumble, in an undertone, over Mr.
Lansdell's shirts and waistcoats, while Roland went into the library to
write his letters.
The letters which he had to write turned out to be only one letter, or
rather a dozen variations upon the same theme, which he tore up, one
after another, almost as soon as they were written. He was not wont to
be so fastidious in the wording of his epistles, but to-night he could
not be satisfied with what he wrote. He wrote to Mrs. Gilbert; yes, to
her! Why should he not write to her when he was going away to-morrow
morning; when he was going to offer up that vague bright dream which had
lately beguiled him, a willing sacrifice, on the altar of duty and
honour?
"I am not much good," he said: for ever excusing his shortcomings by his
self-depreciation. "I never set up for being a good man; but I have some
feeling of honour left in me at the worst." He wrote to Isabel,
therefore, rather than to her husband, and he destroyed many letters
before he wrote what he fancied suitable to the occasion. Did not the
smothered tenderness, the regret, the passion, reveal itself in some of
those letters, in spite of his own determination to be strictly
conventional and correct? But the letter which he wrote last was stiff
and commonplace enough to have satisfied the sternest moralist.
"Dear Mrs. Gilbert,--I much regret that circumstances, which only came to
my knowledge after your party left last night, will oblige me to leave
Mordred early to-morrow morning. I am therefore compelled to forego the
pleasure which I had anticipated from our friendly little dinner
to-morrow evening; but pray assure Smith that the Priory is entirely at
his disposal whenever he likes to come here, and that he is welcome to
make it the scene of half-a-dozen fictions, if he pleases. I fear the
old place will soon look gloomy and desolate enough to satisfy his ideas
of the romantic, for it may be some years before I again see the
Midlandshire woods and meadows."
("The dear old bridge across the waterfall, the old oak under which I
have spent such pleasant hours," Mr. Lansdell had written here in one of
the letters which he destroyed.)
"I hope you will convey to Mr. Gilbert my warmest thanks, with the
accompanying cheque, for the kindness and skill which have endeared him
to my cottagers. I shall be very glad if he will continue to look after
them, and I will arrange for the carrying out of any sanitary
improvements he may suggest to Hodgeson, my steward.
"The library will be always prepared for you whenever you feel inclined
to read and study there, and the contents of the shelves will be
entirely at the service of yourself and Mr. Gilbert.
"With regards to your husband, and all friendly wishes for Smith's
prosperity and success,
"I remain, dear Mrs. Gilbert,
"Yery truly yours,
"ROLAND LANSDELL.
_"Mordred Priory, Saturday night."_
"It may be some years before I again see the Midlandshire woods and
meadows!" This sentence was the gist of the letter, the stiff unmeaning
letter, which was as dull and laboured as a schoolboy's holiday missive
to his honoured parents.
"My poor, innocent, tender-hearted darling! will she be sorry when she
reads it?" thought Mr. Lansdell, as he addressed his letter. "Will this
parting be a new grief to her, a shadowy romantic sorrow, like her
regret for drowned Shelley, or fever-stricken Byron? My darling, my
darling! if fate had sent me here a twelvemonth earlier, you and I might
have been standing side by side in the moonlight, talking of the happy
future before us. Only a year! and there were so many accidents that
might have caused my return. Only one year! and in that little space I
lost my one grand chance of happiness."
Mr. Lansdell had done his duty. He had given Charles Raymond a promise
which he meant to keep; and having done so, he gave his thoughts and
fancies a license which he had never allowed them before. He no longer
struggled to retain the attitude from which he had hitherto endeavoured
to regard Mrs. Gilbert. He no longer considered it his duty to think of
her as a pretty, grown-up child, whose childish follies amused him for
the moment. No; he was going away now, and had no longer need to set any
restraint upon his thoughts. He was going away, and was free to
acknowledge to himself that this love which had grown up so suddenly in
his breast was the one grand passion of his life, and, under different
circumstances, might have been his happiness and redemption.